An ‘Innovation Lab’ for Discovering Retail Technologies

With consumers seeking personal, faster and easier shopping experiences, retailers are increasingly looking to technology for solutions on the front end and the back end of their operations.

With improving business trends and tax cuts, companies will have more money to spend on technology. But the challenge is there’s a morass of emerging technologies complicating where to place their bets.

“The challenge for most start-ups is money,” said Pano Anthos, founder and managing director of XRC Labs, a technology accelerator. And the challenge for retailers is to “get closer” to customers, Anthos added. “It’s about generating an experience that gives the customer a closer connection to the store.”

At last week’s National Retail Federation convention in New York, retailers explored an “Innovation Lab” organized by XRC Labs to showcase robotics, personalization, augmented reality, faster checkout systems, spatial recognition and other technologies, either already in commercial use or at the start-up stage.